Norman Podhoretz, Influential Editor and Neoconservative Force, Dies at 95

A New York intellectual and onetime liberal stalwart, his Commentary magazine became his platform as his political and social view turned sharply rightward.

Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary magazine and a lion of neoconservatism, whose intellectual odyssey took him from embracing the left to condemning a world order that in his eyes had become spineless in the face of Soviet expansionism and, later, Islamist militancy, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 95.

His son, John Podhoretz, confirmed the death in a phone interview and in a statement published on Commentary’s website. He said the cause of death was complications from pneumonia.

Although there were twists to his philosophical journey, Mr. Podhoretz (pronounced pod-HOR-etz) relished being the provocateur, brandishing erudite opinions that ran against the popular grain and became the talk of salons on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and beyond.

Along the way, he won conservative admirers like Ronald Reagan, Henry A. Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick, but jettisoned old friends from his liberal coterie — New York writers and thinkers like Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman and Irving Howe.

“It was a really passionate intellectual life,” he told The New York Times in 2017. “It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements.”

Agree with him or not, in his 35 years at the helm of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, he transformed the magazine from a distinguished journal of social and political criticism into a more controversial and influential voice. It became the bête noire of liberal highbrow magazines like The New York Review of Books and Dissent, its cultural status immortalized in the movie “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen joked that Dissent and Commentary had merged to form “Dysentery.”

While Irving Kristol was the founding thinker of neoconservatism, it was Mr. Podhoretz who became its foreign policy guru.

“Norman laid the groundwork for the muscular democratizing version of neoconservatism,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, a scholar of the movement. “It was a version he contrasted with the more limited foreign policy espoused by neoconservatives like Ms. Kirkpatrick, who were skeptical that the United States could remake developing societies in its image.”

The Podhoretz doctrine reached its influential peak in the administration of President George W. Bush. Admirers of Mr. Podhoretz had become shapers of administration policy and successfully pushed for an invasion of Iraq, for which initial justifications turned out to be faulty; they followed that with a largely aborted effort to democratize the Middle East.

In 2004, Mr. Bush awarded Mr. Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Mr. Podhoretz wrote a dozen books, including “Making It” and other memoirs that recorded his epiphanies, disillusionments, resentments and what he regarded as subsequent vindications, like the collapse of the Soviet Union. When he gave up Commentary’s helm in 1995, he declared with characteristic brashness that he was proud of the magazine’s tough criticism of the civil rights movement, the New Left and those who would accommodate Soviet totalitarianism.

“We were right — morally right and intellectually right — throughout that period,” he told The New York Times.

A gently rumpled, spirited raconteur who combined a scholarly air with a boxer’s pugnacity, Mr. Podhoretz was not someone to mince words. In a 2009 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he said he had long been put off by “the canonization of the Kennedys, whose achievements were paltry when they weren’t positively harmful.”

Mr. Podhoretz “had a Manichaean view of the world,” Mr. Heilbrunn said, but also “a certain love of the fight for the fight itself.”

As a child of working class immigrants, Mr. Podhoretz always held a deep affection for the United States and was particularly grateful that it had accepted Jews like him as no other country would have. His rightward turn, he indicated, was prompted by his repulsion at what he detected as a vein of anti-Americanism among the left.

“They considered this country to be evil,” he said in 1995. “We neoconservatives were not only outraged by this attitude and thought it intellectually wrong in almost every detail, but also thought it was morally outrageous, contemptible and dangerous.”

Son of a Milkman

Norman Harold Podhoretz was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn on Jan. 16, 1930, a son of immigrants from the Galicia region of Eastern Europe. His father was a Yiddish-speaking milkman who made sure that Norman took Hebrew lessons.

In his neighborhood, Mr. Podhoretz once told an interviewer, the worst thing you could be called was “a sissy,” and so young Norman joined a gang called the Cherokees. He attended Boys’ High School, where, he recalled in a memoir, a teacher tried to mold this “filthy little slum child” into college material. He did well enough to earn a scholarship to Columbia University. Because his father insisted that he keep up his Jewish studies, he also took courses at the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary.

At Columbia, he befriended the poet Allen Ginsberg and fell under the influence of Lionel Trilling, the university’s most famous literature teacher. With Trilling’s encouragement, he pursued literary studies at the University of Cambridge, earning a master’s degree.

After two years in the Army, Mr. Podhoretz returned to New York in 1955 and married the social critic Midge Decter the next year.

At the time, Mr. Podhoretz had a reputation as a rising intellectual who was comfortable with politics, culture and literature. He began writing for The New Yorker and Partisan Review.

Disillusioned Trotskyites like Mr. Howe and Mr. Kristol were gathering around journals like Partisan Review and adopting an anti-Communist liberalism, and Mr. Podhoretz moved with that crowd. For a time, he hung around with Mr. Mailer, attending a marijuana party and an orgy with him, he said. He confessed that both had left him less than fulfilled.

In 1955, Mr. Podhoretz was hired as an assistant editor at Commentary, a magazine of Jewish interests with broader political aspirations, but he left to pursue freelance book reviewing and essay writing. He won notches on his critic’s belt by going after big reputations, disparaging Saul Bellow’s early novel “The Adventures of Augie March” in a 1953 review and writing off the Beats as “young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can.”

“Bellow wouldn’t speak to me for years,” Mr. Podhoretz said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “It was only when he decided he couldn’t stand Alfred Kazin anymore that we became sort of friendly.”

“We were sitting together in a meeting, Saul and I, and Kazin was over there,” he said, referencing the writer and prominent literary critic, “and he said, ‘Look at him, he looks like he just ate a pastrami sandwich out of a stained brown piece of paper.’ To incur Saul Bellow’s wrath was dangerous.”

Mr. Podhoretz became Commentary’s editor in chief in 1960, when the magazine had a circulation of 10,000, and he happily predicted a “national move to the left.” He serialized Paul Goodman’s book “Growing Up Absurd,” an indictment of American society that became a bible of disaffected youth, and attracted writers like Mr. Howe, Mr. Kazin and Hannah Arendt. Before long, he would fall out with most of them.

Still, he endorsed some New Left stands, and Commentary published Mr. Mailer’s article “The Battle of the Pentagon,” with its condemnation of the Vietnam War. Under Mr. Podhoretz, Commentary’s circulation grew to 60,000 by 1966.

A Rightward Turn

But he soon began distancing himself from the left. His magazine published articles on what it said were the dangers of the Black Panthers and the follies of women’s liberation, a favorite target of his wife. He regarded the Black Power movement as marred by antisemitism and felt that the antiwar movement had become nihilistic. The magazine became a steady critic of affirmative action.

A watershed, though, may have been more personal than political. In the late 1960s, Mr. Podhoretz published his first memoir, “Making It,” in which he wrote about the intellectual set’s longing for money, power, fame and social status — an ambition, he said, that “seems to be replacing erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul.”

The book drew scathing reviews, including from The New York Review, and was partly responsible for a classic intellectual fight. Mr. Podhoretz described the publisher and editor Jason Epstein, a financial backer of The Review, who had been a friend, as one whose radicalism “consists entirely of preserving and enlarging the heritage of hatred for America.”

The Review may have gotten its revenge by besting Commentary in circulation, with Commentary declining to 27,000 by the time of Mr. Podhoretz’s retirement in 1995 — a fraction of The Review’s circulation, which stood at 135,000 in 2009. But Mr. Podhoretz got in more licks in memoirs like “Breaking Ranks” and “Ex-Friends,” in which he described his falling-out with Mr. Epstein and others. Mr. Podhoretz said that his old friends “looked upon me as a dangerous heretic” and that he considered them a threat to “everything I now held dear.”

Mr. Podhoretz was an Upper West Sider for much of his life, though in later years he moved to the Upper East Side. He was proud that his wife, Ms. Decter, was another luminary of neoconservatism and that his son, John, was a proverbial chip off the old block, becoming editor of the conservative Weekly Standard (which he founded with William Kristol, Irving Kristol’s son) for a stretch, and editor of Commentary in 2009.

His wife, Ms. Decter, died in 2022. His survivors include his son, John.

In his later years, Mr. Podhoretz was welcomed into new circles — including the Reagan White House and that of George W. Bush. He occasionally spoke to Mr. Reagan by phone. But ever the contrarian, he also laced into the president for, in his view, not being tough enough in taking on the Soviet Union and defending Israel.

Mr. Podhoretz alienated some Jewish admirers in the 1990s when he attacked Yitzhak Rabin, then the prime minister of Israel, for engaging in peace talks with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Mr. Podhoretz had previously urged Jews to silence their criticism of Israeli policies.

More than once, he puzzled some of his intellectual backers. After initially supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida in the 2016 presidential primaries, he gave a grudging endorsement to Donald J. Trump as “the lesser evil.”

One of his last publications was bluntly titled “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” (2007). It was a book, according to a Times review, that “furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine.”

In the 2017 interview, Mr. Podhoretz said the world of the New York intellectuals that had nurtured him was an extinct product of another time.

“Nobody cares that much anymore,” he said. “We really cared.”

Dan Watson contributed reporting.

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